Living Future unConference 2019

Set against one of New Zealand's most stunning natural backdrops, Camp Glenorchy has been created with beauty, comfort and sensory delight in mind whilst achieving Zero Energy in operation. Designed to challenge preconceptions that sustainability within tourism accommodation infers sacrifice, this session offers opportunities to learn how collaboration technically and creatively can create the potential to instigate change. In this session you will hear from the visionaries behind Camp Glenorchy, academic research, the technical team and the operations team behind New Zealand’s first Zero Energy visitor accommodation in an informal presentation with opportunity for Q&A.

This session will provide a broad cross section of insight into how a project has created a thriving hub within a small rural community, created financial growth and an abundance of rich experiences for visitors. Hear from the visionary couple behind the idea for Camp Glenorchy, stories of collaboration amongst a community and between the community and the design/construction team. Debbi will talk to the aesthetic vision for the campsite, the use of local artists and craftspeople, recycled materials and how inspiration was drawn from the natural patterns and place based relationships in the Glenorchy environs.

This session is approved for the following continuing education credits:

• 1.5 LFA credits
• 1.5 AIA LU|HSW credits

King County and the 39 cities in King County have a formal shared goal to reduce countywide sources of greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050.  King County and 13 cities have a joint commitment to achieve net zero GHG emissions in new buildings by 2030. The King County Strategic Climate Action Plan (SCAP) establishes a target of 100% of King County projects achieve certifications demonstrating a net zero GHG emissions footprint for new facilities and infrastructure by 2030, and includes a commitment to identify and register 10 ZE/LBC projects by 2020. The projects will be built in multiple jurisdictions throughout the county, increasing the opportunities for regional code and policy advancement.

Through extensive collaborative efforts, both internally in King County government and externally with the International Living Future Institute and city jurisdictions, King County has been able to build a framework to accomplish this goal. This framework has resulted in further increasing awareness of emissions reduction opportunities in the built environment, increasing awareness of the Living Building Challenge, and establishing replicable tools and practices to initiate ZE/LBC projects for public work, infrastructure, and industrial type projects.

This session will feature speakers from the County's collective effort, representing executive level staff, project representatives, city representatives, and ILFI partners. Speakers will share policies, lessons learned, best practices, project details, and feasibility assessment tools with attendees that can be replicated in other jurisdictions. The information presented can be useful for attendees whether they are representing government agencies themselves, working on government projects, or even hoping to bring ZE/LBC to their local jurisdiction. Furthermore, there are significant opportunities to scale up these examples and impact different public work industries across the country – such as solid waste and recycling management, wastewater treatment, parks and recreation, mass transit and affordable housing. Demonstrating examples of local government taking action, surfacing and solving barriers, and making significant shifts in practice to meet GHG emissions reductions is timely and significant in the context of current federal affairs.

This session is approved for the following continuing education credits:

• 1.5 LFA credits
• 1.5 AIA LU|HSW credits

Sustainable buildings and facilities are critical to a future that is socially just, ecologically restorative, culturally rich and economically viable within the climate change context. Despite over a decade of strategies and programmes, progress on built environment sustainability fails to address these key issues. Consequently, the built environment sector no longer has the luxury of being incrementally less bad, but, with urgency, needs to adopt net-positive, restorative sustainability thinking to incrementally do ‘more good’.

This session will focus on the work that the COST RESTORE project has been achieving in Europe over the last two years to accelerate the adoption and awareness of restorative buildings. The session will review research, collaboration and projects that have emerged from this partnership of 130 organizations and institutions. The panellists will elaborate also on how the Living Building Challenge can bring restorative principles to building projects through this Action across Europe.

(COST is an EU-funded programme that enables researchers to set up their interdisciplinary research networks in Europe and beyond.)

The audience will be provided with three brief visual and oral presentations, introducing innovative elements of discussion. The following debate among the presenters will give the opportunity to go more in detail, with focus on the feasibility of the solutions envisioned. Moreover, an adequate space will be done for questions and answers from the audience, to stimulate new way of thinking and approaches, and critical contributions useful for the understanding of the described scenario.

This session is approved for the following continuing education credits:

• 1.25 LFA credits
• 1.25 AIA LU|HSW credits

With over 100 certified and 500 registered projects, the Living Building Challenge is growing fast. Over the last few years, projects have grown in size, complexity, and geographic reach. Now projects are replicating. Through ILFI’s new volume certification program, companies and organizations are pursuing certification across their entire portfolios and campuses. Earlier adopters span industries and sectors including tech, retail, hospitality, government, affordable housing, and market rate development. The approaches and pathways vary from creation of design standards that apply across diverse building types to development of replicable prototypes; and from zero carbon and zero energy to Petal and Living certification. The models vary but the goals are the same – scaling impact and moving more quickly toward a Living Future for All.  
Learning Objectives:

1. Articulate the benefits of volume certification for owners and the environment.
2. Describe how to apply Zero Carbon and Zero Energy Certification across a portfolio.
3. Understand how documentation and the audit process are streamlined in volume certification. 
4. Compare volume certification approaches for certifying a prototype across a variety of locations versus a variety of buildings in one location.

This session is approved for the following continuing education credits:

• 1.5 LFA credits
• 1.5 AIA LU credits

This talk is based upon the Burwood Brickworks project - a multi-tenanted retail building in Melbourne, Australia. The Brickworks is attempting to be the world's first “Living Shopping Centre”, generating more energy than it consumes, capturing, cleaning, and recirculating all of its water, using a healthy materials palette, and integrating Australia’s first rooftop urban farm on top of the shopping mall.

This talk will provide a specific focus not on the technicalities of each feature of the building, but on the strategies, solutions, and failures that are making it possible to engage with a large number of people in a way that is often not possible. A direct call to action for true collaboration, Peri will describe how the project is existing in a challenging commercial context. Through working together with numerous people over a long period of time, the project so far has been able to engage those in industry as well as the general public in a refreshing way - at a scale not yet seen before. It describes some of the best practice approaches taken, sharing the learning from successes, and the frustrations endured in the process.

The talk will focus on the commercial reality of shopping centres more generally, and how this has provided a difficult, but not impossible starting point! Peri will also discuss the concept of shared value - a management strategy that delegates can learn from and take away to their organisations, to create business value by addressing social challenges. This has been a key tenet of the Burwood Brickworks shopping centre development, because the goal has always been to achieve financial success without the expense of other loftier goals. Inspired by Australia’s commitment to target zero carbon emissions for new buildings by 2030, Frasers Property Australia embraced the concept of shared value as a framework for the development of other the Brickworks. The approach started with a commitment to the triple-bottom line: a quantifiable financial benefit to the company, coupled with measurable positive impact on the community and regeneration in the environment. In the process, the project will set a new global benchmark in terms of what’s possible for retail development more generally. The project seeks to prove that environmental performance is possible, without losing the financial and social benefits - key to getting serious investment from the private sector.

Finally, Peri will share how he has worked with a team of passionate individuals, with their eyes on achieving something extraordinary. He will talk about the conditions that make it possible for a commercial developer with the standard financial hurdles to do a project like the Brickworks, and underline the true backbone of the project's ability to target such success - the culture of the team behind it.

This session is approved for the following continuing education credits:

• 1.25 LFA credits
• 1.25 AIA LU credits

PAE is a mechanical and electrical engineering firm that has helped design 23 Net Zero Energy and 7 Living Buildings, including the Bullitt Center and Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) Innovation Center. The firm’s Seattle Office is located in the Bullitt Center and has experienced the benefits of working in a Living Building. When their Portland Office outgrew its space they needed to find a new home for their 150 Oregon employees. Building their own Living Building was their first choice. PAE partnered with ZGF Architects (who was also part of the RMI Innovation Center project), Gerding Edlen Development (GED), and Walsh Construction to make the project a reality.

The project is programmed as a roughly 55,000 square foot, 5-story office building in downtown Portland and is still in development. PAE, ZGF, Walsh and GED will have ownership stake, but the project is also pursuing outside investor and bank financing. The financial model is typical for speculative urban development – and this is what makes it unique among Living Buildings. Of the 61 Living Buildings currently certified, only one is a non-owner occupied commercial office: the Bullitt Center, which also houses the Bullitt Foundation headquarters. If the project can be brought to reality, it may be the first investor-driven Living Building and will present a replicable model for this common urban building type.

This session includes the developer, architect, and tenant/engineer for the project and will lay out not only the technical challenges, but also the financial implications of a Living Building as a real estate investment. The technical implications of Net Positive Energy and Net Positive Water are well understood. Net Positive goals lead towards buildings with very low energy and water use, and energy and water collection systems as well as waste-treatment equipment such as composters. Less widely appreciated by the technical community may be how these systems affect lease rates and operating expenses.

This session is approved for the following continuing education credits:

• 1.25 LFA credits
• 1.25 AIA LU credits